No American has ever run 100 meters faster than Tyson Gay; he just does not have the Olympic gold medal to show for it. In fact, he does not have any Olympic medals.

For a man who measures success in fractions of a second, timing has long been an issue for Gay. He won three gold medals at the 2007 world championships in Osaka, Japan, beating the world record holder Asafa Powell in the 100, outrunning a long-legged 20-year-old named Usain Bolt in the 200, and defeating both as the United States won the 4x100 relay.

“For the moment,” Bolt said of Gay at the time, “he is unbeatable.”

But timing is everything: Gay won the 100 at the United States Olympic trials in 2008, but then sustained a hamstring injury that ruled him out of the 200 for Beijing. Despite training feverishly to get healthy in time for the Games, Gay failed to make the final in the 100 and then was part of a botched exchange that led to disqualification for the Americans in the relay. He went home empty-handed, and later lamented his conditioning to a London newspaper as “a bit like having a Ferrari but with a Beetle engine in it.”

Bolt ran right past him over the next year, breaking the world record in Beijing and taking away Gay’s world title in 2009 in Berlin, when he lowered the record again. While Gay’s time at the worlds that day (9.71) was the third-fastest in history, Bolt’s 9.58 stole all the headlines.

Instead of letting Bolt run away, however, Gay reeled him in. He ran the second-fastest 100 in history (9.69) in the fall of 2009, a time that would have denied Bolt the gold in Beijing, and then beat Bolt in a head-to-head matchup in the DN Galan final in 2010.

That loss remains Bolt’s only defeat in a competitive race since 2008, and it stands as a reminder to Gay, who had hip surgery last summer, that the Jamaican can be beaten. It just takes the right runner, on the right track, on the right day.